New Windows Azure Traffic Manager Features Ease Visibility Into Hosted Service Health

We announced several updates to Windows Azure at MIX11. One was a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of Windows Azure Traffic Manager, which allows you to load-balance traffic to multiple hosted services. Today we are pleased to announce that an updated version of the Windows Azure Traffic Manager CTP, which offers enhanced visibility of your policy’s monitoring status, is now available.

The new version offers a Poll State column in the Windows Azure Platform Management Portal that displays the most recent monitor status for all defined Traffic Manager policies. You can use this status to understand the health of your domains. When a policy is healthy, DNS queries will be distributed to your hosted services based on the policy’s configuration, e.g., Round Robin, Performance or Failover. Once the Traffic Manager monitoring system detects a change in monitor status, it updates the Poll State entry in the Management Portal.

This new visibility into the health of your policies helps you understand and manage your end user’s experience. Keep in mind that although there is no charge for Traffic Manager, its monitoring transactions are not free. We recommend using the default monitor value, “/” or as small a monitor probe file as possible.

During the CTP period, Windows Azure Traffic Manager is free of charge, and invitation-only. To request an invitation, please visit the Beta Programs section of the Windows Azure Platform Management Portal. Click here to learn more about Windows Azure Traffic Manager.